Word: small-town
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hailing from Missoula, Mont., the then-freshman backstroker wasn’t exactly enjoying the transition from small-town club swimming to the intercollegiate scene and, for a while at least, wasn’t quite sure that he’d be staying between the lanes...
Updike entered Harvard a star student from small-town Pennsylvania. He left the University a scholar near the top of his class, a professional fiction writer and a young husband...
Like his character, Updike came to Harvard as a scholarship student from a small-town public high school, where his father taught mathematics, having been valedictorian and class president. Harvard attracted him partly because of pressure from his mother, herself an aspiring writer, who noticed that most of the authors in a particular anthology had Harvard degrees...
...joke has tarnished under the weight of what Updike has described as his “ponderously growing oeuvre, dragging behind [him] like an ever-heavier tail.” But even half a century later, the image remains an apt one for the small-town high-achiever who grappled through Harvard and, for the 50 years since, has sustained a steady pace across the page...
...this takes place within the perennial court of inquiry that is small-town life. The meticulous carpentry of Haruf's prose, all those spare run-on sentences, owes debts to Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. Haruf's words lend weight to the takeout-pizza boxes and so forth of modern Colorado. So is it churlish to point out that behind the facade of its steadfast language, this is a fairly sentimental book? And one too much in thrall to its own lugubrious music, which is no substitute for narrative drive. It's a fine line between gravity and listlessness. Time...